Soft communicating meters

Forced by the deregulation and privatization of the energy utilities, the way the utilities need to interact with the customers, small or large, is changing. Norway deregulated the energy market in 1991 and opened it for small customers in 1995. With this basis, the main functional requirements for a new metering system that incorporates two way customer communication is proposed. The main features of a system that could meet these requirements is described, focusing on software in the meters and the data models used for the meter interface. Details are given of a object model for metered data used for this purpose in Norway. The basic idea of the soft meter is to implement all the meters functionality and communication handling in software. The hardware is restricted to standard selections of sensors, input-output and communication ports, and a processor, all with standardized interfaces. The author discusses the common data model, multiple communication media, and the GS2 metered data object model